Re: [NOISE] Cable-TV-Piracy-Punks

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

Mike Duvos writes:
> We aren't talking about IC masks here.  We are talking about
> electrostatic charges which would instantly leak away if the
> insulation around them were in the least bit compromised.

I was under the impression charges had associated fields which could
be detected without physically touching the charged object. Silly me.

Incidently, EEPROMs don't work by simply charging a capacitor or
something silly like that. No insulator is perfect, no dielectric is
perfect, and charge would eventually leak away were that the
case. However, if it were, it would be fairly easy to determine the
state of a cell without having to get particularly close to it. Beyond
that, there is this insane notion you seem to have that a charged
object will lose its charge if the "insulator" is "stripped off" -- I
wasn't under the impression a vacuum, for instance, was a particularly
good charge carrier.

> Such data wouldn't even survive the preparation for scanning
> microscopy, much less the actual inspection process.

I believe you are operating on some sort of weird faith here rather
than in reality. Reality is that even the extraordinarily well built
circuits on the Capstone and similar chips that the NSA is trusting
the Skipjack algorithm to aren't believed to be uncompromisable -- I
believe the words were something to the effect of "it would take
the resources of a national laboratory to reverse engineer" or some
such.

In any case, I don't care to debate this further. I am coming to
believe very strongly that you just don't know what you are talking about.

>  > They aren't immune to the laws of physics. If it can be put
>  > together, it can be taken apart. I can even surmise HOW it
>  > can be taken apart.
> 
> If you put something fragile inside a container which cannot be
> breached without exposing the fragile thing to a destructive
> environment, then the fragile thing is very unlikely to be
> retrieved intact.

If a container contains some protective gas, you can pressurize the
exterior with the same at the same pressure. If the container contains
a vacuum, you can open the container in a vacuum. If the contents are
light sensitive, you can open the container in the dark.

This is a problem like copy protection. Yes, you can make things
arbitrarily hard, but you can't make them hard enough.

>  > The Americans trust their money to the notion that no
>  > counterfeiter can afford to pay a million or so for an
>  > intaglio press.
> 
> It is neither likely nor relevant.

No, its relevant. You cut out what I quoted, which was you saying "the
europeans trust smartcards for storing money", to which I noted,
basically, "so what; people trust even more easily forged things like
paper, with nothing standing between a forgery and the forger than
some special paper and an intaglio press." You brought it up, not me.

> An endless metaphysical quibble over whether God can create a
> smart card he can't peek into does not serve to further
> illuminate the cryptographic issues under discussion.

The point is that men can't create an impenetrable smart card.

Perry